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Velcroman1 writes: "In the olden times before high-speed Internet, the game you purchased on day one was what you were still playing months later. Now we live in an era of day-one patches, hotfixes, balance updates, and more. Diablo III, for example, is unrecognizable today compared to the state it was in when it launched back in 2012. Nowadays, savvy gamers go in expecting their experience to change over time — to improve over time. Today, 'Early Access' is both an acknowledgment of the dangers of early adoption (no one likes to be a guinea pig, after all) and an opportunity for enthusiastic consumers to have a say in how the product they've purchased will take shape. In this article, Adam Rosenberg talks with Michael McMain, CEO and founder of Xaviant, and creative director on the indie studio's first project — Lichdom: Battlemage, which embraces the concept like never before."

We lost the ability to mod a lot of games because of stupid DRM controls and lock-down.

We had power when we could come up with something like Desert Combat mod, or there were tens of thousands of downloadable mods to turn the base game into really incredible things. There are some games like that still, like Minecraft, but for the most part, that is no longer true.

It's not really that, either. It's that modding modern games is simply more difficult, because the games are more complex. Sure, a company can spend the time and effort to produce good mod tools, but that's not necessarily a good business decision. It's a major selling point for certain franchises, but not every game is going to develop a big modding community. Would Company of Heroes 2 have sold better if it had better modding support? Or would that just have been wasted money by the developer?